Edith Hamilton was an American educator and writer. She was a well-known classicist and writer on mythology, and notable popularizer of classical literature.
Background
Edith Hamilton was born on August 12, 1867 in Dresden, Saxony (now Germany). She was the eldest of five children of Montgomery Hamilton, a Fort Wayne, Indiana, businessman, and of Gertrude Pond. Edith's childhood was spent in Fort Wayne. Hamilton's family was exceptionally gifted and intellectual, and she was raised on a family estate with many servants, many relatives, and no need for outsiders.
Hamilton's father never worked a day in his life; he was a voracious reader and an educated man but was interested mainly in literature and religious heresies. According to Hamilton, he was a horrible teacher. Her mother encouraged her to play outdoors and to learn foreign languages.
Education
Hamilton began to study Latin and Greek with her father at an early age. She learned German from servants and a Lutheran tutor, developing an ever-deeper interest in languages and in literature.
She attended Miss Porter's School at Farmington, Connecticut, and Bryn Mawr College, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in 1894, and was a Bryn Mawr fellow in Latin in 1894-1895.
Hamilton received a Bryn Mawr European Fellowship in 1895; she then spent a year at the universities of Leipzig and Munich with her younger sister, Alice Hamilton, a physician.
In 1950 Hamilton received an honorary degrees of Doctor of Letters from the University of Rochester and the University of Pennsylvania. She was also the recipient of an honorary degree from Yale University in 1960. In addition, Hamilton was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1955 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1957.
Career
Hamilton became headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, Md. , in 1896, where she taught until 1922 when she resigned and moved to New York City to devote full time to classical studies. By that time, she had built the Bryn Mawr School into a leading academic center from its early failure as the nation's first women's college-preparatory school. Hamilton was encouraged to write by a new circle of literary friends that included Edith J. R. Isaacs, a founder of Theatre Arts Monthly; Rosamond Gilder and Dorothea McCollester, editors of Theatre Arts Monthly; and Elling Aannestad, an editor with W. W. Norton and Company.
She published her first popular article, "Tragedy, " at the age of 59 in Theatre Arts Monthly. This and seven other articles from the same magazine were expanded into her first book, The Greek Way (1930; revised, expanded, and reissued as The Great Age of Greek Literature, 1942). The Greek Way was immediately acclaimed as the work of a major author with a fresh style and program.
Her later works are marked by the same individualism, her ideas based almost entirely upon critical knowledge of the original-language sources, with little attention to later interpretations. Her style is varied and flowing, highly polished but slightly embellished, reminding one much of the style of Walter Pater but lacking his coldness. Her style is restrained romantic, with more interest in philosophy than in morality. Her second book, The Roman Way (1932), is a colder picture of a less fertile and admirable culture, but contains no overt judgments. The Prophets of Israel (1936), Hamilton's first venture into the biblical field, is a study of the Old Testment from three contradictory viewpoints: orthodoxy, higher criticism, and mythopoeia. Although hard to evaluate against the body of Old Testament literature, it is an exciting account of her own knowledge of the texts. Mythology (1942) shows the same conflicts in Greek and Roman myth, and Witness to the Truth (1948), a study of the New Testament, cuts through and ignores almost all later commentary, being based almost entirely upon Greek texts. Christian ideology seems refreshed in her personalized view of the Messiah. Spokesmen for God (1949) revised and enlarged her Prophets of Israel, also dealing with the first five books of the Bible.
Hamilton's long apprenticeship to classical studies led to a late maturity of ten books, thirty popular articles, and four translations. Despite her social poise and polished lecture style, she was a very private person, the great events of her life being intellectual ones.
Hamilton finished each writing project quickly and left little unpublished material at her death in Washington, D. C. Her translation of Euripides' Trojan Women was then in press and was published on almost the same day as Jean-Paul Sartre's French rendering of the same play. These two different translations, each grand in its own manner, seek some common ground in antique texts for the differing thoughts of our age.
Views
Quotations:
“Love cannot live where there is no trust. ”
“The mind knows only what lies near the heart. ”
“The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat. ”
“None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught. ”
“He drew iron tears down Pluto's cheek and make Hell grant what Love did seek. ”
“He was there beside her; yet she was far away from him, alone with her outraged love and her ruined life. ”
“For all men serve him of their own free will. And he whom Love touches not walks in darkness. ”
“A man without fear cannot be a slave. ”
“The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind. ”
“The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think. ”
Personality
Hamilton was withdrawn, intense, moody, and somewhat depressive. However, she was also caring, a gifted storyteller, and had a phenomenal memory.
Her sister Alice says of her in Edith Hamilton: An Intimate Portrait, by Doris Fielding Reid: "Edith had intense emotions. She had her times of joyous gaiety over the beauties of the outside world or a new book or some amusing family episode, but she had her sudden deep depressions that mystified me. "
